A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words? Not On The Web.

You have probably heard the age-old proverb "A picture is worth a thousand words" describing the idea that a single image can tell an entire story. This is a powerful proverb but really can be quite deceiving when applied to the web. It really should read "A picture is only as good as your ALT attribute(s)". What does this mean? Your ALT attribute is applied to the image tag as alternative text to those who may not be able to see your images. Now while this may seem trivial since less than .0000001% of users wouldn't be able to see your images there is one very powerful user of your site in that 0000001% that you may not be aware of and they cannot see images. Who or better what am I referring to? A crawler. Crawlers are those robots that are deployed by the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc..) to index the pages of your site. These crawlers are focused on one thing and one thing only - Content. Images play a vital role in the enhancement of your content and overall aesthetic of your site but if you have no content you are simply out of luck. Just think about every time you have done a search on the web and you get the results. Are these results based on the images on the site or the content and copy of the page itself. Crawlers are robots and nothing more. So while you or I could look at a picture and use hundreds if not thousands of words to describe that image - a robot simply cannot. They rely on us to describe the image using the ALT attribute but beyond that they see nothing. This is not an argument for less images, and more content but simply a reminder of why content is so vital on the web and can often be the most overlooked thing when building a site. So while "A picture is worth a thousand words", on the web I believe "Content is King".